Over their lifetime, the average person in Britain spends 3,515 days at work – most of them in an office. Still, too often, we regard the place where we work as a physical building, or as the background for our professional activities. In fact, a workplace should be thought of as a member of the team: not only it needs to be attuned with the people working with it, and help them express their potential and achieve their results – but, crucially, it has the power of hampering their work if it is not a good fit.
A workplace’s design plays a key role in fostering creativity, improving productivity and shaping a company’s culture. If employees find their workspace inspirational, it will show. Alas, according to a 2017 Global Report by American furniture manufacturer Steelcase, only 13 per cent of workers worldwide are “highly satisfied” with their workplace. In the same year, research from Microsoft found that 41 per cent of surveyed workers in UK offices blamed uninspiring workplaces for hindering their creativity.
According to Microsoft’s Chief Storyteller Steve Clayton, that is hardly surprising: workplaces are one of the key building blocks of professional creativity. “Technology, culture and, crucially, workplace – if you get all of those three things together you really start to see how to encourage creativity and a networked way of working,” Clayton explains.
He recalls how he once engineered the construction of a Microsoft meeting space on a treehouse, and how positively the employees reacted to the new structure. “That treehouse showed us that the environment where you work can have a real effect in the work you do,” he says.
Why are offices designed so badly?
Sadly, many offices have been designed with an outdated, top-down working culture in mind – one which begot cubicles and corner offices, and where teamwork was seen as a relay race: each employee did his or her bit in isolation before passing the baton to another team member.
“Teamwork today is more like football, a sport with constant interaction with team-mates,” says Chris Congdon, Global Research Communications at Steelcase. “Activity goes back and forth, and people are in almost constant interaction. And current workplaces, are really getting in the way of teams working together effectively, because so much is designed around an individual sitting at a desk.”
“What we're now seeing is a major shift, in which workplaces need to be designed around these new team units.”
Technology is playing a substantial role in bringing about such a shift. As it happened with workplace design, technology went from being developed with individuals working in isolation in mind – take, for instance personal computers or offline word processors – to catering to networks and teams constantly working jointly on a common goal. AI – and in particular machine learning – can be harnessed to eliminate language and communication barriers, gather data and deliver business insights at a speedier pace, and allow employees to fully develop their creative potential. Online collaboration platforms, Mixed Reality, and the accessibility tools built into the software we use every day are all gesturing towards a new more collaborative and inclusive paradigm.
Hacking your workplace
In the workplace, this paradigm shift requires first of all embracing flexibility. If employees are to thrive, they should not have to adapt to their workplace – quite the opposite: the space where they work should be pliable to their needs.
“[The key] is freedom to ‘tweak’ or mark the space, within reason. It needs to feel like the space belongs to everyone, reflecting the culture of the occupants,” explains Heather Martin, Head of Design at design and innovation consultancy Fjord. “In Fjord’s London studio is a column that was pristine white when we moved in. Within a few weeks people started to randomly place stickers there. People were using it as an opportunity to personalise the space.”
Steelcase’s Congdon agrees: “The team needs to be able to control their environment. So much of our furnishings and our technology are static, they are in one place, and it's very difficult for teams to move things around,” she says.
“Some teams are literally hacking their space in order to create the kind of environment they need to work in– taking over areas where they can try and move things around, literally taking doors off hinges in order to create larger tables and meeting areas.”
Planned design solutions don’t have to be that drastic but can take a leaf out of workplace-hackers’ book by including smaller areas for individual work, cosy spaces for focused pair-work, and larger “ideation hubs” where teammates can come together, both physically and digitally, to share ideas fluidly.